Vanke Starlight Forest Park

Vanke Starlight Forest is a small street-corner park in Chongqing designed by WISTO, Chongqing Welto Landscape, for Vanke, conceived as a way of bringing the mountain forest of nearby Zhaomushan down to an urban intersection. The L-shaped, 5,623-square-metre plot sits beside a municipal forest park; in the near term it serves as a Vanke residential sales gallery, and in the long term it will become a community kindergarten. Rather than treat the landscape as a temporary display, the designers agreed with the client to build a forest-themed corner park that stays permanently open to the city. The programme is organized around two open rooms: a small plaza at the convergence of two roads, and a tree-shaded courtyard around the bend. On two sides the plaza is bounded by city roads and on the third by the building facade and kindergarten wall; the wall is treated as a fully transparent glass plane set inside an open landscape trellis, allowing passers-by to pause, sit and look into the garden. The centre of the plaza is a stone landscape that recreates the boulders seen in the adjacent forest park, emerging from the soil with scattered moss and grasses, so neighbourhood children can climb, jump, chase and hide as if playing in nature itself. The shaded courtyard is formed by a grove of Chinese tallow trees planted at four-to-five-metre spacing, a simulated small hill planted with trees and grasses in the joints of the stones, and a signature Starlight Ring. The hill resolves the level difference between the residential compound wall and the small park while producing a memorable spatial sequence. The Starlight Ring comprises two rings, one large and thick, the other small and thin, defining the park entry; the apex reaches six metres above ground, and at night a dense band of light floats through the tallow grove as the park's beacon. The inner face of the large ring is a 360-degree mirror, multiplying the few tallow trees within it into an infinite forest image. The completed park settles quietly into the corner, offering passers-by a moment of rest and an unselfconscious encounter with urban beauty and warmth.